[科技前沿]中国能源问题两难——清洁城市和不清洁煤能

中国正在大力建造清洁城市和宣扬使用可再生清洁能源同时，然而中国的煤炭能源的一步扩大使用正在阻碍这种努力。总所周知，煤炭来来是中国的主要能源之一，仅在”中国火炉”重庆，每年就有几千个矿工因为挖煤而失去自己的宝贵生命，如何减少对煤炭的依赖，快速建立清洁城市呢？

Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox（矛盾）

CHONGQING—This year China surpassed (超越)the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter（释放者） of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel （挖煤）out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution.

The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chongqing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt （美国工业老区，传统的制造业中心）of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,（中国的火炉）” as it is known—a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region.

Chongqing’s men, women and children breathe air filled with lung-clogging soot and smoke（可以进入呼吸道的没煤灰微粒）. Nationally, health care associated with respiratory ills（呼吸道疾病） costs China an estimated $100 billion a year, according to the World Bank（世界银行）. Furthermore, the foul air can literally stunt the growth of the next generation, according to recent research from Frederica P. Perera of Columbia University and her Chinese colleagues.

The Chinese have been burning coal for centuries. They now consume 2.5 billion tons a year—more than double that of the U.S.—and imports are rising despite extensive domestic mining. In 2007 the country’s 541 coal-fired power plants pumped out 554,420 megawatts（兆瓦） of electricity, according to the Chinese State Electricity Regulatory Commission（中国国家电力监管委员会）—roughly equivalent to the output of 550 large nuclear reactors. On average, China opens one coal-fired plant every week to serve its 1.3 billion people and the massive industries that manufacture cheap goods, largely for the U.S. and Europe.

Notwithstanding its deeply polluted state, China is also working feverishly(兴奋地) to clean up. It plans to reduce pollutants（污染物） by as much as 10 percent over the next five years. Part of the effort involves creating carbon-neutral cities and expanding renewable energy sources, as described in the stories that follow. Much of the strategy, however, is simply to shutter small, inefficient coal plants and replace them with larger ones that are more efficient. “To close small plants, it will be very effective to improve air quality,” Sarah Liang, a spokesperson in Greenpeace’s Beijing office, tells me. But that still leaves a load of pollution.

Greener Generation（更环保的能源生产）

Despite the surfeit（过量） of soot（烟灰）, the average Chinese citizen accounts for a mere fraction(一小部分) of the greenhouse emissions of the average American. Sheer population overcomes the small per capita number, however, and the country is not bound by any international treaty to reduce its pollution.

Nevertheless, the government has at least started to tackle the problem by launching a pilot project to capture and store the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from burning coal at a demonstration power plant dubbed GreenGen.

The project, in the Yellow Sea port city of Tianjin northeast of here, will proceed in three phases. First, a consortium of power and coal companies will construct a so-called integrated gasification (气化)combined cycle power plant. In this design, coal is converted into a gas, and pollutants are removed before the gas is burned. Such technology could cut acid rain–causing sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 90 percent and smog-forming nitrous oxides by 75 percent—as well as capturing more than 80 percent of the CO2 emitted by 2015 and storing it in nearby depleted （大大减少的）oil fields.

The $1-billion GreenGen plant became the world’s leading clean coal project in January after the U.S. government pulled the plug on FutureGen, a similar demonstration plant in Mattoon, Ill., that lost steam as construction costs skyrocketed（突升）. The cancellation came despite the fact that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leaders of the world’s eight richest nations (the G8), including President George W. Bush, had called the development of clean coal technology essential to preventing the consequences of climate change.

Completing GreenGen, which will generate up to 250 megawatts of electricity, may prove daunting, however. “There’s no co-benefit to doing the carbon capture and storage,” says energy technology expert Kelly Sims Gallagher of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “There’s an argument for doing GreenGen in terms of research and getting experience with it, but from a commercial point of view it doesn’t make sense.” The reason: extra energy is consumed to turn the coal into gas and subsequently to then capture the CO2—in effect requiring the burning of more coal to generate the same amount of electricity.

GreenGen is a for-profit power plant, so economic gains or losses will determine whether its owners ever proceed with the capture-and-storage step. One argument in its favor would be to pump the extracted CO2 into underperforming oil wells to recover more of the oil. In an environment where oil is more expensive than ever, that approach could be “economically viable and valuable for nations that are rich in coal,” says Vic Svec, a senior vice president at U.S. coal giant Peabody, which is part owner of GreenGen.

Better Enforcement Needed(需要更有效的管理)

Residents of Chongqing got a glimpse of cleaner skies in the years leading up to the recent Olympics, as factories were shifted to the outskirts of towns and small, inefficient coal power plants were closed to clear the air for visiting media and tourists. “When I was young, the sky was green, and we [could not] see stars at night,” says local government official David Lee, a lifelong Chongqing resident. “This year we see blue skies and stars. We think it’s much better.”

The air can still be tasted on the tongue, however, and felt in the lungs. And it still obscured the horizon for this observer. Among the culprits （罪犯）are companies that flout （轻视）clean air laws—as well as lackluster efforts to enforce those laws. Factories and power plants turn on the pollution-control equipment when government officials visit, but when they leave the controls are shut off to boost power production. “The government cannot check every day,” Lee says. But regulators “need to enforce the environmental laws if they want blue skies,” insists Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Other cities, such as Zhengzhou in China’s most populous province of Henan, have little hope of clear skies any time soon. The atmosphere in the provincial capital is thick with pollution because the movement of factories and power plants away from signature cities such as Beijing has put them closer to less well-known metropolises.

Despite a ban on coal burning and $17 billion spent on clean air measures in the past decade, smog is still an issue in Beijing, in part because cars have proliferated in recent years. “It is bitter air that you can feel,” says resident Timothy Hui, a program manager in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based environmental group. “People hate it. They complain.”

Some analysts place part of the blame on Western countries. A full 23 percent of China’s greenhouse gas emissions can be linked to the production of goods exported to the West, according to the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in England. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University put the share even higher: at 33 percent.

That demand doesn’t absolve（赦免） China from cutting back on noxious emissions or taking more responsibility for the fate of the world’s climate, which in no small part will be forged in the crucible of its industrial cities. “Gradual warming of the earth’s atmosphere is caused by the developing countries as well as the developed countries,” says Wang Xiansheng, professor of English at Zhengzhou University. “The whole world should get united to deal with the problem.”

Keke View：有关专家预测，在今后50年内煤炭仍将长期是我国的主要能源。煤炭工业要在“十一五”期间实现资源节约型、环境友好型和走新型工业化道路的发展目标，确保国家能源安全，必须大力发展煤炭科技，促进科技成果的转化，不断提高煤炭资源安全开采与洁净利用的水平。成立能源与安全科技园，组建技术研发平台，转化能源科技成果，有利于促进我国煤炭工业、能源工业实现节约发展、清洁发展、安全发展以及可持续发展。